By: Dale

There seems to be a whole lot of hype and innovation in the watch industry lately. Rumours are swirling and hype is feeding the race for the first connected and integrated watch. Personally I’m a fan of a traditional timepiece and think a watch should be what a watch is – a device designed to tell the time.
But there’s a hoard of tech-savvy folks out there who want their watch to be their phone, or their gate remote or whatever else a scientist can cram inside it. I’ve never quite got it and none of the devices in the media have captivated or made sense to me.
Until I came across COOKOO…
It’s a watch that keeps you connected to your mobile device, effectively an extension of your smartphone that helps you manage your life. The thinking is that your smartphone isn’t always at hand, but the COOKOO watch is.
I could see this simplifying my life. Being able to receive alerts and notifications from my smartphone, when I don’t have it in my hand is a bonus. And COOKOO does all of that, such as:
Incoming calls
Missed calls
Facebook messages and posts
Calendar reminders
Your device is out of range
Low battery on iPhone or iPad
Alarm and Timer alert
Plus there’s a command button that you can customise to do the things you want to do…
Check in on Facebook
A remote for your phones camera
A remote to play, pause & skip songs
And more as their developer community grows.
What’s also appealing is that the watch doesn’t need to be charged. It uses a standard battery that lasts as long as a typical watch would.
The COOKOO goes for R1500.

In some businesses many marketers also play a sales role. It’s more likely a trend in small to medium sized organisations because larger organisations would typically have a marketing team made up of a number of people with a range of skills covering the marketing mix. And sales remains the preverbal anchor tenant. Either way, marketing as an art and science really does need to deliver quantifiable data to aid both sales and the further refinement of the dynamic marketing strategy itself. Magic?
We’re able to do it. Using Marketing Technology.
It’s viable to have your marketing activities and engagements measured accurately and adjusted in realtime based on parameters that the business defines in a boutique strategy.
The system identifies opportunities to communicate with your customers in line with data it’s aiming to gather to populate it’s customer database of “fact sheets.” The marketing manager activates these new opportunities with white-label sales material that is reusable and consistent across all platforms.
This sales material uses the information in the customer database to offer strategic advice by presenting available variables (such as date, location or gender) to insert into communication, customer profiles (like commonalities, likelihoods and comparisons) to target archetypes and history log files (showing past interactions) for a 360 degree customer view – where it counts. And lastly, a revenue projection based on the opportunities being successfully activated. Which, when placed alongside a customer lifetime value, assists by suggesting three budget risk profiles in aid of spending marketing budgets more efficiently to reach customers and populate the customer database with additional data.
Using this additional data the process starts again and new opportunities are made available to activate.
Companies with access to the Marketing Technology system are making good use of their leads. Well, not just their leads – all available customer data. And the result is increased sales backed by targeted spend and solid data.

I was on the hunt for a new coffee table earlier this year. I swear, I literally visited every large and medium furniture outlet in the greater JHB area over two months or so until I finally settled on my vibe. I’m totally happy with what I got in the end, it’s right for my place. But I noticed something about furniture in SA: We’re very conservative. And the stores we imagine would be pushing the boundaries or exposing us to new, innovative and creative ideas don’t seem to be doing much.
So I do hope that some of them are taking notice of what is happening abroad. For example, this new Floppy Table. Inspired by the iconic floppy disk, the design certainly brings up childhood memories for anyone born before the 90′s, considering nobody has used one in years for the most part. Hand made in Germany, the Floppy Table is made of steel. How awesome?
Next, I came across this 12:1 scale mixtape table which is available just in time for the cassette tape’s 50th anniversary and is made of high-grade Baltic birch plywood with maple veneer, solid American walnut, and features a hand-applied oil finish. If you look close you’ll see the glass top surface too. And just like a real cassette tape, the piece is completely reversible.